note: i wrote a review for this game in early 2023 which i've since expanded & revised below for the december 2023 full release
great fundamentals (it feels good to shoot guys, i like cowboys) but extremely shaky in the finer details (everything else). at its core theres a great game here; i love slinking around the rotting desertscape and stepping on meaty viscous carrion and blowing grub men's heads up with my big rifle, but the interstitial bits dont facilitate those things very well. fundamentally the guns feel good and shoot better; cowboy weapons are always a treat because the slow reload times and low magazine sizes demand a lot of patience and careful consideration and so combat encounters become a game of stealth and precision rather than just jumping around spraying bullets everywhere (which i'm shitty at!). the three maps available in the full campaign are packed with bits of gear and special guns but feel very cold towards the player, since you can't really interact with any of the objects laying around and there's scary monsters that bite you everywhere. my initial playthrough of the game months ago had me really annoyed with all the backtracking needed to get around the map but further updates have mitigated that a little bit with some handy teleporation items. the problem though is that in theory this could be a rich wild west hell world but in practice it almost plays like a roguelike - you run to a location you haven't explored, run around cover picking up random bullets and bandages and shooting zombies in the head (you have to land head shots, every enemy takes about 20000 body shots to kill), and then you get low on resources and teleport back home to sell the loot and start over. it's somewhat fun at first but it gets old pretty fast!
a lot of this may just be my shitty video game abilities clashing with an intentionally hostile world, which would make sense - this is a setting warped by evil undead monsters, there's eldritch blood magic or something, i dunno but you would expect it to be very harsh towards human survival. where the game lost me is in trying to pull an actual narrative out of any of this. the basic story (i think) is that you're a dead gunslinger revived by native american ghosts? to purge the land of cursed artifacts which have allowed evil flying skulls and wendigos to kill everyone... yeah obviously this is pretty dumb. i don't know if the native american elements are even horribly offensive beyond being cliched, but they seem to be included as a flimsy justification for the fantastical story elements and if you're not gonna put the effort in to do a decent portrayal then you're just asking for some scrutiny, like come on. most of the lore comes via little notes scattered around the map that take up inventory space and aren't particularly interesting and i ended up just immediately selling them off without reading after going thru about twenty or so. i don't mean to be entirely negative though because i do like the general tone and a lot of the creature designs!! there clearly is a lot of heart here but it feels like some of the narrative and theming are simply there so that the gameplay elements (which are fun to be clear, if repetitive) have a reason to exist. i've had a hard time getting into this one in the past but with the full release it's warmed on me a little, so even if i never play this one again i'll probably still check out whatever the developers make next.
great fundamentals (it feels good to shoot guys, i like cowboys) but extremely shaky in the finer details (everything else). at its core theres a great game here; i love slinking around the rotting desertscape and stepping on meaty viscous carrion and blowing grub men's heads up with my big rifle, but the interstitial bits dont facilitate those things very well. fundamentally the guns feel good and shoot better; cowboy weapons are always a treat because the slow reload times and low magazine sizes demand a lot of patience and careful consideration and so combat encounters become a game of stealth and precision rather than just jumping around spraying bullets everywhere (which i'm shitty at!). the three maps available in the full campaign are packed with bits of gear and special guns but feel very cold towards the player, since you can't really interact with any of the objects laying around and there's scary monsters that bite you everywhere. my initial playthrough of the game months ago had me really annoyed with all the backtracking needed to get around the map but further updates have mitigated that a little bit with some handy teleporation items. the problem though is that in theory this could be a rich wild west hell world but in practice it almost plays like a roguelike - you run to a location you haven't explored, run around cover picking up random bullets and bandages and shooting zombies in the head (you have to land head shots, every enemy takes about 20000 body shots to kill), and then you get low on resources and teleport back home to sell the loot and start over. it's somewhat fun at first but it gets old pretty fast!
a lot of this may just be my shitty video game abilities clashing with an intentionally hostile world, which would make sense - this is a setting warped by evil undead monsters, there's eldritch blood magic or something, i dunno but you would expect it to be very harsh towards human survival. where the game lost me is in trying to pull an actual narrative out of any of this. the basic story (i think) is that you're a dead gunslinger revived by native american ghosts? to purge the land of cursed artifacts which have allowed evil flying skulls and wendigos to kill everyone... yeah obviously this is pretty dumb. i don't know if the native american elements are even horribly offensive beyond being cliched, but they seem to be included as a flimsy justification for the fantastical story elements and if you're not gonna put the effort in to do a decent portrayal then you're just asking for some scrutiny, like come on. most of the lore comes via little notes scattered around the map that take up inventory space and aren't particularly interesting and i ended up just immediately selling them off without reading after going thru about twenty or so. i don't mean to be entirely negative though because i do like the general tone and a lot of the creature designs!! there clearly is a lot of heart here but it feels like some of the narrative and theming are simply there so that the gameplay elements (which are fun to be clear, if repetitive) have a reason to exist. i've had a hard time getting into this one in the past but with the full release it's warmed on me a little, so even if i never play this one again i'll probably still check out whatever the developers make next.